Naim Factory Tour

James and I spent a very pleasant afternoon being shown around Naim’s impressive Salisbury factory. The company’s premises have grown organically from the first building it occupied into a series of adjacent properties, at least that’s the way it feels on the inside, you could easily get lost in the place. It’s densely packed despite the fact that it makes everything to order so does not keep stock in the usual sense, there’s no huge stock room like you find in other factories. The despatch area is also the stock room and it was a busy place when we visited.

Naim employs nearly 200 people and builds all of its own products (except the mu–so) although it doesn’t make wood and metalwork in–house but it populates circuit boards and does all assembly, testing and QC on the premises. It also services everything that it has ever made in a very busy service and repair department where they log details of every incoming unit and take photos of the most extreme examples. For instance, one customer had made an outboard power supply by putting the transformer in a Tupperware box , another had re–wired a complete product with a different type of cable! Needless to say these are not practises that Naim recommends.

What strikes you about the company is its depth of knowledge about the subject and commitment to quality control in the context of a constant desire to push the capabilities of its products. Its streaming devices now account for 30% of turnover and developing them has resulted in a considerable expansion in the R&D department, which has doubled in the last five years and now numbers around 40 specialist engineers in various disciplines. Some are software experts who spend far too long looking at code while others have a computer on one desk and tools and test rigs on another. There are electronic, mechanical and software engineers in this department and they share the most compact and densely packed listening room I have seen in some time. We found director and head of R&D Roy George in the more lavish surrounds of the listening room used to demonstrate to distributors and dealers, but he says that the smaller room is so familiar that he finds it very easy to work in. On this occasion he was refining passive crossovers for the Ovator S800 which is just too big for the other space. What’s impressive is that Roy manages to get time to listen while running a department of that size. He must be committed to the cause.

Naim is of the opinion that multi–brand systems are a thing of the past when it comes to electronics. Other manufacturers take this one step further and believe that multibox systems are a dying breed, but should it prove true Naim has this angle covered with its Uniti range. In both cases we are talking about market sectors, and those of us in search of high fidelity are rather more flexible. We appreciate the ‘electronic lego’ that Naim produces and which makes upgrading so much easier than other routes.